Before we can really get started, we have to take a brief detour. If you're reading this, you probably hit the Next button shortly after reading:
If you believe truth is worth pursuing at all, then that's a spark I want to fan with my next post.
Before we can pursue truth, we have to understand how far we're willing to pursue it, and why. We can't be honest about ourselves, and yet take half-measures in the pursuit of truth.
Two Big Rules
If you grew up in a Christian or other religious faith, you probably live under these two rules, whether they're explicit or implicit:
- We should seek to find and believe in the truth.
- We must think Good Thoughts, and not think Bad Thoughts.
Rule 2 generally comes with a big payload of culture, about what's a Good Thought, and what's a Bad one.
Most of the time, we can fulfill these two rules in perfect harmony. But what happens if they're in conflict? What we need is precedence - a way to resolve conflicts, by preferring one rule over the other, in the event of a conflict. And in order to do that, we need to figure out which rule should have precedence over the other.
Disaster Preparedness Kit
Your knee-jerk reaction here is probably, that your Good Thoughts are not in conflict with Truth. The Good Thoughts tell you so - in fact, depending on your belief system, doubt is likely a Bad Thought.
This is the wrong way to frame it. Even the most honest, useful rules come into conflict all the time, so to be unprepared is irresponsible. Having a precedence is like a disaster preparedness kit, or health insurance. You hope to never need it, but it's better to have it just in case.
To further drive home the point, there are billions of people in the world, who believe different things from each other (and you), and most of them are unprepared to resolve conflicts between these two rules. They can't all have a handle on truth, all at the same time, while believing contradictory things! So no one - no matter their beliefs - can afford to be so arrogant to not make a decision of precedence here.
Which rule?
If we have to prefer one rule over the other, in situations where the two conflict - which should we choose? I would argue that Rule 1 will promote, or converge on, whatever absolute truth is possible for humans to find. But Rule 2 can give false credence to any self-reinforcing idea. Perhaps this is just restating the problem - do we care more about absolute truth, or feeling moral about our beliefs - but I want to take a step further, to illustrate how moralization of beliefs can be dangerous, and even absurd.
The parable of Steve
You have a friend named Steve. Steve doesn't believe anything you do - in fact, he falls for some very silly ideas indeed! But he tends to support his arguments in annoyingly familiar ways. One day he comes to you with the following exclamation:
Have you heard about Gamehfamel?!
You blink a few moments, trying to decide whether you've just heard someone pronounce a sneeze as a word.
"Gameffawha, now?"
Gamehfamel. He wasn't the first Pegasus, or the last, but he's arguably the most important Pegasus in human history.
There's a beat of bemused silence, which does not put Steve off in the slightest.
Okay, so this dude, he's flying around, and sees us from a bird's eye view. Or a horse's eye view, heh. He sees us toiling for unfair masters. He sees us wage war fruitlessly, and give birth to generation after generation consigned to the mud. He decides that this young species, humans, have grown up fast lately, but are still trapped by our lack of perspective. We're trapped on the ground.
"Sure."
So Gamehfamel decides, he's gonna give people wings. He starts giving people wings left and right, like if Oprah was a sentient flying pony. You get wings! And you get wings! Pretty soon there's a bunch of people with wings sprouting out of their backs.
You raise an eyebrow - not for the first time in this conversation - and Steve continues excitedly.
But what do people use their wings for? Same shit we eventually invented airplanes for anyways - warfare. The Flyers become this elite class of mutant humans that fight with each other, wage unfair wars with ordinary humans - just complete abuse of power. Gamehfamel had to take their wings back, because people were just stupidly irresponsible.
Sounds like humanity. The Pegasus stuff is a bit tenuous.
But he gave us his word. Someday, Gamehfamel will come back, and all of the faithful will get wings, when we've proven that humanity can fly without being total pigeons about it. And on that day, I want you to fly with me!
"So you want to convert me to your... Pegasus religion. Just what I always needed."
More than you even know, man!
"But Steve, the very concept of this is ridiculous. There's absolutely no reliable record of even a single Pegasus existing."
Your mainstream evidence doesn't faze me. I have faith.
"But why? Why faith in this of all things?"
Well, I do have doubts sometimes, but I can't let them take root. If I doubt, I'm forfeiting my wings. I can't afford to do that! But even more than that...
Steve lowers his voice, reflecting the surprisingly vulnerable moment he's about to share with you...
I just want to be a good person, okay? If I believe in the word of Gamehfamel, I can be a good person. Obviously there's more to it than that, but if I stray from his word, what does that make me? I don't know if I can be okay with myself, as someone who heard the Pegasus truth, and walked away from it. Only bad people, who give in to evil thoughts, do that. I just want to be a good person.
Sinkholes
I suspect you don't believe in the Pegasus Truth now, more than you did before you heard of it. But Steve not only believes it, he feels morally compelled to believe it. Such belief systems can be thought of as sinkholes - easy to fall into, but they are really hard to get out of. These generally do not happen by accident - they are created by design - and survive indefinitely, because it's an effective pattern.
The recipe for a sinkhole is simple. You classify everyone in your sinkhole as good, and anyone trying to leave as bad. Do this, and people will break their own ladders, rather than climb out of the hole - no matter how many ladders are thrown into the hole. It is a self-enforcing ideology. It is resistant to escape.
Of course, the harder something is to escape, the more necessary it is to escape it.
An important thing to realize, is that sinkholes are orthogonal to truth. Something isn't true or false, by being part of such a belief system. But such a belief system can give artificial credence to an idea, by penalizing honest and unbounded pursuit of truth.
Again, I have to appeal to the idea that there are hundreds of thousands of sinkhole belief systems in the present day, and a handful of really popular ones. These all disagree with one another, but all use the same technique (moralization of belief) to look true. So moralization of belief, or sinkholism, says absolutely nothing about whether those beliefs are true or false. It neither proves, nor disproves them.
Precedence
The crux of my argument, is that if you put Rule 2 above Rule 1, you will be vulnerable whatever sinkhole you fall into first. If you allow a "good thoughts/bad thoughts" mentality to censor what you're allowed to consider, you will fall into the first available hole and never get out.
We can debate all day about whether it's better to pursue absolute truth (even when it's challenging) or to preserve your self-reinforcing comfort zone (which will always have some agreeable values). But every such comfort zone is controlled by someone, and that someone may not have your best interests at heart. That's a lot of power and trust to invest - especially if you're investing in the first person to claim your lifetime as a prize.
If you were born into a belief system, and you find yourself saying "I'm lucky I'm an X - if I hadn't been born into it, I probably would never believe in it!"... consider whether you were perhaps born in a hole, which your parents either fell into, or were born into.
To my mind, the only safety - the only escape from intellectual feudalism - is to put Rule 1 above Rule 2.
Putting Truth above Morally-Motivated Belief
It's all very well and good to show off some pitfalls, and say "this is bad, the opposite is good". But that's not very usefully instructive. What does life look like, when we put Rule 1 above Rule 2?
Sometimes, it's identical to your ordinary life, in a surprisingly boring manner. It's not like it's suddenly fantastic to harm your fellow man, or even change most of your habits.
But sometimes, it's dramatic - and often, retrospective. It's hard to break the habits of self-censorship, and not feel naked without that perceived protection. This is pretty ironic, as those protections tend to be prison guards keeping you in, rather than defenders keeping evil out. If you make an effort to put Honest Pursuit of Truth over Self-Censorship, you'll be surprised on a regular basis, with how often you naturally would put them in the opposite order - especially after you've already done so without thinking about it.
Not that this should be a surprise. Christianity leans heavily on verses like:
Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. - Proverbs 3:5
This is the signature of a sinkhole, at least as we've described it, and with all the associated dangers. This idea can only infantilize you, if you allow it to infantalize you - if you take for granted that you are good or bad, according to whether you replace basic reasoning with blind trust. Or even according to whether you have some specific belief(s) or not.
I know that by providing a Bible verse to the contrary, I've made this journey suddenly very difficult for some of my readers. And you are not obligated to me, to pursue truth any further than you're comfortable with. But I suspect... perhaps believe... that you're obligated to yourself to reexamine, one last time, before plunging into the really uncomfortable material -
Am I ready to pursue truth, no matter how far it goes?
If the answer is yes, keep going. If the answer is no... you have your answer.